Initiatives to foster Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through the Web and nurture collaborative conversations in a recently liberalized Myanmar have garnered Davis Projects for Peace awards for three Bates students.

The $10,000 awards support international projects that college students undertake to “bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world,” in the words of philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis. Learn more.

Two seniors, Spencer Collet of Leawood, Kan., and James LePage of Cumberland, Maine, received the award for “Tweets for Peace,” their project using the Internet to enhance communication between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The pair will work with former participants in the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution program that takes place every summer in Otisfield, Maine.

Aung Myint, a junior from Yangon, Myanmar, received his award for “Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations,” a reading-discussion program to help build the capacity for critical judgment and constructive dialogue among ethnic minorities in his native country. Using Burmese translations of English texts from the Maryland-based Touchstones Discussion Project, Myint will coordinate gatherings in Buddhist monasteries in Yangon.

This X-ray showing a nail in a person’s neck is from the lead image of Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project, an exhibition by Diane Covert that was featured in the Bates Chapel in early February. Covert’s project uses X-rays and CT scans from the two largest hospitals in Jerusalem to depict graphically the effects of terrorism on a civilian population. The exhibit was part of “Art and Alterity: Beyond the Other as Enemy in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” a series of Bates events organized by Anna Levy ’09 of Portland and College chaplain William Blaine-Wallace that used arts-related programming to prompt campus conversations about Israeli-Palestinian relations.